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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that you don't actually buy e-books from Amazon, you license the right to read, and when that license is revoked/cancelled, those books are no longer available to you.

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I wonder if some large organisation (EU?) could force a change in this idea? It does seem like an end-run around so much in the way of consumer rights.

EU seems likely, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that customers have the right to resale on licensed Steam games. The reasoning was basically that a perpetual license equals ownership, and that normal ownership right cannot be limited by the license after the transaction.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-03-eu-rules-publis...

I've been thinking for some time now that legislation is needed for the cloud and "online accounts".

Being banned from Google, Amazon & others for sometimes very fuzzy reasons can be major inconvenient. Sure, it's not a human right or a life or death situation, but they occupy dominant space on their markets and on some people life.

Makes me wonder. What happens if you just don't connect your kindle to the net? I have a wifi only kindle which I never connect to the internet because I don't have a wifi connection anymore so I usually keep a local repository of my ebooks which I just drop on my kindle when I want to read them. Is the DRM contained in the azw and mobi files eventually going to stop me from opening them unless I connect to a wireless network?

I expect that some of the time constrained licenses (aka "Book Rentals") will expire even if you aren't connected to the network. The longer term books should be yours permanently, even if Amazon issues a "kill order" - unless you connect to the 'net.

I guess I never really considered that. Under what terms might that license be revoked/cancelled? It appears Amazon also lets you "rent" e-books for a certain amount of time. I suspect most people would assume that the high cost alternative to "renting" would be "buy to own". Especially considering the fact that the Kindle books typically cost the same (occasionally even a little bit more) than the physical books.

Well that depends. If a court decides that you own files you purchase online like this, then you own it.

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